Let’s Revisit Ancient Rome

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: “So passes the glory of the world.”

The History of Gloria Mundi

When Mike Selinker and I were cranking out the greatest hits of the 2000’s, we sold a game called Gloria Mundi to Jay Tummelson at Rio Grande Games. It was a cute little resource-management game about greedy aristocrats trying to make it through the fall of Rome.

Back then, Mike and I had a lot of irons in the fire. So when Jay asked for a few changes, to address real problems with the core mechanics, we dropped the ball. This is a common problem in game publishing, when the due date triumphs over the finishing pass. To put it mildly, we were not satisfied with the result.

The Rio Grande edition shipped in 2006, and was “okay” but not world-on-fire-setting. When it sold through, Jay wisely decided not to reprint it. Eventually, the rights came back to me and Mike. That was roughly 2010.

I built a new “English Language Edition,” and started slowly testing and fixing it. (The Rio Grande edition had been mostly in Latin, mixed with pictograms.) I rolled the game back a step, and then moved forward from there, this time without the pressure of a due date. Now I think I have a pretty good build.

This fall, I plan to release an open beta of the new edition. Hopefully more people can see the new rules, try them out, and help make this game as good as it can be.

Not Ready Quite Yet!

I was about to start piecing the new beta version together, and then I played the game twice with Nora this afternoon. We hit upon yet another core change I want to make, so I’m not actually ready to show it yet. To compound this frustration, I will be away from my magical game machine for roughly the entire month of September.

Nevertheless, I want to let everyone know that I’m working on Gloria Mundi again, and perhaps even whet your appetite for a new open beta version in October.

What’s the Game?

In short, you’re trying to make the best of a bad situation. You’re an aristocrat loaded with holdings all over Italy, but Rome is being invaded and civilization as you know it is being destroyed. You’ll play cards, produce resources, buy upgrades, and score points. Meanwhile the rampaging Visigoths will destroy your stuff nearly as fast as you can build it. (At least you get to keep the points.) It’s chaotic and strategic in just the right mix, with a generous helping of hurt-your-neighbor.

On each turn, you first get to decide what kind of season it is. You start with a hand full of holdings in three types: Cities, Farms, and Legions. When you play one of these cards, it affects the entire table; if it’s a farm, everyone’s Farms make Food.

Next, you can take the resources you have collected, and buy one upgrade card to improve one of your holdings. For example, you might buy a Trade Route and build it on one of your City cards. That one gives you additional production options each time anyone plays a City.

And finally, you can bribe the Goth. He’s an angry red pawn who’s moving toward Rome at roughly the same speed that you’re running away. If he moves, he destroys holdings, starting with you. If you bribe him, he destroys nothing, but he becomes all the hungrier on the next turn.

The road to Rome is also the scoring track. The game is over when someone escapes (reaches the end of the track) or when the Goth reaches Rome. In all it’s a quirky, medium-weight, approachable little game. Well worth making a new edition.

What’s New?

If you’re familiar with the Rio Grande edition of Gloria Mundi, the following will make sense to you. Otherwise it probably won’t. In that case, you should stop now and wait for the beta rules to post!

The Hate Vector: One of the big balancing challenges in the game is the “hate,” which is our inside term for the Goth’s destructive power. In the original game it was possible to lose stuff before you had even had a turn, because the hate passed to the left. In the new edition, the hate goes in reverse turn order. So it still starts on the active player, but it goes backward through the people who just went, not forward through the people who have yet to go. If you play the original with only that one change, we think it’s a vast improvement. This one change makes a world of difference.

The Language Barrier: True enough, symbols help you localize a game. So does writing all the cards in a dead language, we guess. But because of the symbols, we ended up retiring about a third of the card abilities, and many others only make sense because they are explained in the rules. In the original submission, we based our reading level on Puerto Rico’s many lines of text on every tile, and the cards did interesting things. It’s nice to return to that format and let the cards have more varied effects.

War is Peace: In the original submission, Legions made War. Rio Grande changed that metaphor to “Peace,” which is a cute bit of sanitizing that had unintended consequences. The game originally had three core resource colors: red (for war), green (for food), and yellow (for gold). These were also the colors of the foundation cards, on which three colors of upgrade cards could be built. There was also a wild type of upgrade, which was neutral gray. When War became Peace, the red color became white, and “wild” therefore became red. Sadly, red is not a wild color, and that’s one of the more visually confusing parts of the Rio Grande edition. This also means it’s going to be slightly hard to play the English Language Edition using the Rio Grande pieces, because War is back, baby, and it’s red as hell.

Price Fixing: Gloria Mundi uses a typical “auction line” mechanic for upgrade cards, an ever-shifting line of cards that players can buy. The Rio Grande version also contained a reverse-auction mechanic, in which cards in the newer part of the line have an extra cost above their printed cost, theoretically to keep players from “getting lucky” and turning over a cheap or instant-buy card on their turn. If you have first crack at a card, you have to pay extra. Through most of the last ten years of testing, we have ignored the reverse auction and left all cards at their printed price. However, we also remove those instant-buy cards that seemed to necessitate the system. Recently, we’ve engineered a more interesting version of reverse auction, in which stale cards get randomly cheaper, rather than new cards having a fixed higher price. This innovation is based on a similar mechanic in After the Fog.

A Million Cuts: In addition to the concepts above, balancing this game is a matter of testing and tweaking, reviewing and revising. Nearly every card has been changed in ability, cost, frequency, and value. And honestly I wish I had been as good at this process in 2006 as I am today.

So it’s not perfect, but it’s getting better. We’ll post a beta version sometime in the fall, to give you something to do while you watch modern civilization teeter on the edge of collapse. And if you’re a fan of the game already, we hope you’ll help us keep the parts you love!

And assuming that civilization survives, you can look for Lone Shark Games to Kickstart a shiny new edition of Gloria Mundi, as soon as we decide it’s time!